Notice that the Post didn’t even ask if Christianity did play a role in the killing — which would have been weird enough. No, for the Post, that question was settled; the only one worth asking is the nature of the role.

Were you aware that there was a Christian angle to the shocking murder? No? Because guess what: there isn’t. The Washington Post is making it up, in a “when did you stop beating your wife” kind of way.

On March 2, the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger reported that people close to the dead man, Marco McMillian, and the accused murderer, Lawrence Reed, say the two were friend, possibly lovers, and had a fight. Excerpts:

Friends of Reed told Memphis television station WPTY that the two recently had met at a Clarksdale bar and became close. Then, sometime either late Monday night or early Tuesday morning, McMillian made sexual advances on Reed, the friends said, adding that Reed is straight.

Friends of McMillian, however, say the two men were romantically involved and quarreled immediately before the slaying.

“They were having an affair,” said 18-year-old Carlos Jones. “They got to tussling.”

There is no evidence — none — that Christianity had anything to do with this hideous killing, which, whether it was “gay panic” or a lover’s quarrel gone badly wrong, was apparently a crime of passion. But that wasn’t good enough for the Washington Post, which fanned the flames of anti-religious bigotry by desperately searching for a faith angle.

A reader in the chat pointed out to Hirschfield that we don’t know Reed’s religious beliefs, if he had any at all, and whether or not they played a role in his alleged murder of McMillian. Hirschfield conceded the point, but added:

The one thing we can say, independant [sic] of knowing Reed’s mind, is that were he subjected to a great deal of homophobic teaching, it may have shaped his understanding of what is fair to do to gay people. Again, that is not always the case, but there is enough evidence for that ocurring [sic] that we need to be very careful about the language we use to describe those who may think of as sinful or “other”.

Got that? Simply living in the vicinity of the Christian religion can turn you into a stone-cold murderer. I read that in the Washington Post online.

When a Jewish person is arrested for killing someone, will the Post invite Father F.X. O’Finnerty in to discuss the role Judaism played in the killing? Even in the absence of any evidence to suggest that the murder suspect practiced Judaism, or that Jewish teaching had a thing to do with the killing? Because if they did such a thing, it would be blatantly, disgustingly anti-Semitic. It would also be an act of grotesque civic irresponsibility so vile and provocative you’d have to wonder what the newspaper’s ultimate goal was.

Do not doubt that the Washington Post knows exactly what its doing. And it’s proud of it. There will be a lot more of this kind of thing. We live in interesting times.

UPDATE: A reader who agrees with the basic thrust of this post points out that the Post‘s introduction was more nuanced than its headline. Here’s how the intro reads:

Last week, an openly gay mayoral candidate was beaten, set on fire and dumped near a river in Mississippi. The incident has sparked a public debate about whether or not Christians, by not supporting homosexuals, play a role in this type of anti-gay violence.

Point taken, but I believe that this is a distinction without a difference. There has been no public debate about this. The Washington Post wishes to start one, because it wants to smear traditional Christians and their beliefs as dangerous and a civic threat.

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85 Responses to WaPo: Christianity Creates Killers

And I didnotice that your 1960’s timeline. Rather arbitrary place to start. But that has nothing to do with whether the Washington Post was ballyhhoing up the cause of the crime inquestion as being fomented by Christians —-

Has the WashPo ever published an equally made up article entitled, “Islam creates militant Jihadists bent on destroying Western civilization.” Now, that would be offensive, because we all know Jihadists are not…Oh bother.

The WaPo has been a waste of time for decades. This gambit – this topic heading type – is exactly we see from Fox, another waste of time. Rather than make an accusation which would not fly, they ask it as a question. The important thing is to get the words out there. Oh, and to attract attention, and stir up enough people to start a 24 hour spin cycle of pure nonsense. They can always fall back on “it was just a question to start a dialog”.

“Islamic violence has been the bigger story in the past decade-and-a-half, for various reasons, but there were plenty of instances of organized inter-denominational Christian violence well into the latter 20th century–the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Serbian/Croatian violence following the breakup of Yugoslavia, to name two examples.”

EngineerScotty, as Rod noted above, the connections between those horrible conflicts and Christianity are certainly legitimate to explore. But on closer analysis, the analogy to Islamic-inspired violence fails.

Few actors in the Northern Ireland and Serbo-Croatian conflicts cite religious motives of any kind. In both those cases, the “denominations” are tribal markers — they are about ancestry, so each group includes large numbers of non-believers.

In Northern Ireland, the US media relentlessly uses the terms Catholic and Protestant to describe the two sides. But the IRA is a secular, avowedly socialist force whose leadership is generally anti-clerical. The Loyalist side has, historically, invoked Protestantism in order to characterize its position as a defense against the Roman Catholic hordes. But more often they call themselves Loyalists or Unionists. Nobody over there is fighting to uphold the beliefs of John Calvin or the Council of Trent.

The Serbs and Croats spent five decades under Marxist rule, and the Milosevic government was officially atheist. The “religious” boundary between the two groups is again a tribal marker. Nobody there is fighting over papal primacy or the filioque clause.

With Islam, we unfortunately have a different story: Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have explicitly carried out their acts in the name of Islam, publicly justifying their actions as “religious duty.” This does not mean that Islam = Terrorism. But we have to acknowledge that this kind of terrorism is a PART of Islam in the world today, and that certain Muslim religious beliefs contribute directly to it.

quote: “Until conservative Christians stop blaming gay people for being gay, they are probably partly to blame for these kinds of things.”

I am a conservative Christian and do not think that sexual orientation and homosexual desires specifically are a choice. However, sexual orientation and whether or not sexual orientation can be changed isn’t the real issue. The real issue is whether or not homosexual behavior is sinful. If it is sinful, and as a conservative Christian I believe that the Bible is clear that it is sinful, then those who have homosexual desires and cannot in good conscience marry someone of the opposite sex should live in chastity.

The problem is that as long as conservative Christians maintain that homosexual behavior is sinful, we will be labeled as “bigots,” “homophobes” and so forth by the left. Nevermind that we also view fornication and adultery as sinful. And it won’t matter if conservative Christians all say that orientation isn’t a choice. Nor will it matter if we decry violence and verbal abuse of homosexuals, as many of us indeed have. And it sure won’t matter if most of the problems that gays experience are actually their own fault, as with the CDC reporting that 61% of new HIV infection cases in 2009 (2009! not 1989) were among gay men. Don’t expect that to get much coverage in the media or discussion on the left.

As long as conservative Christians view homosexual behavior as sinful, the left will accuse us of directly or indirectly causing problems for gays. In other words, and speaking of changing, the left won’t stop blaming conservative Christians until we change our religious beliefs. Not that we should change our religion, especially to suite the likes of secular leftists, whose motives for blaming conservative Christians simply can’t be trusted.

quote: “Vastly more homosexual men have been killed because of their own irresponsible sexual behavior than because of “gay-bashing”. Andrew Sullivan sought over the internet unprotected, anonymous sex with men long after he knew that he was HIV-positive (resulting, from his own admission, from his astounding promiscuity). We’ll never know how many men Sullivan may have infected (knowingly) with an incurable and almost always fatal disease. Where is the justice for him? Talk about killing gay people just for being gay!”

If this is true about Sullivan, why indeed isn’t there more outrage for his dangerous behavior? Shouldn’t there or aren’t there laws on the books about this sort of behavior? HIV is no laughing matter. Really, if this is true, Sullivan ought to go to jail for it.

All the blood libel talk is just absurd and more than a bit embarrassing. Has the urge toward victimization in our culture become so intoxicating that it’s irresistible even to many conservative Christians, or is this just a rhetorical pose? I honestly wonder since it has very little basis in reality.

Patrick, almost all homicides are the work of professional criminals, post-adolescent gangbangers, and people who cannot control their temper in domestic disputes. ‘Conservatives’ who show up in churches on Sunday look around them and see no one who fits that description.

I’d agree to all of that. Nonetheless, it’s perfectly reasonable to think and talk about how the language used in some churches and by some prominent Christian voices might give criminals, gangbangers or hot-tempered idiots an excuse to act out. At least in my experience with some brands of conservative Baptist churches, there’s very little emphasis on loving the sinner and far too much on demonization of the fallen individual. That strikes me as something worthy of discussion, not only for it’s implications for the culture and public policy, but also because it’s a pretty important deviation from the core message of Christianity.

I don’t think anyone is claiming that the WaPo has covered itself in glory with its sensationalist treatment of the chat (which as an aside is very much in the unsurprising category), but that doesn’t mean a discussion about the issue isn’t important and appropriate or that this overblown reaction is reasonable.

While I agree that the Washington Post (a ridiculously boring conservative paper that supported the Iraq war) was over the top, rr’s comments demostrate clearly why the question was asked in the first place. If you demonize a certain class of people and SOME conservative christian assuredly do demonize homosexuals, you can’t be horribly shocked when that crosses over into violence although at this point there is no evidence that played a role in this killing and the use of the term Christianity was absurdly broad.

Art Deco wrote: “Just to point out that the University of Missouri at Kansas City has a database compiled of lynchings performed after 1881. IIRC, about 3,600 blacks were lynched over a period of 60-odd years, for an annual rate of around 0.47 per 100,000. The typical Southern county had a mean of one lynching every 20 years or so, so it was not exactly a quotidienne event in those circumstances. If you look at the specific histories of the post-1946 cases, it appears they define lynching rather loosely – as any murder conjoined to a kidnapping.”

Just to point out, I don’t imagine that the total number of lynchings was more important than the terror of living with the knowlege that a lynching could happen at any time and you or any surviving family members would have no recourse.

Rod, I haven’t checked in on the other comments on this, but I think that you’re being overly sensitive.

1. When there are Jewish elements to violent crimes, they are always discussed. All one has to do is look at the extensive coverage of the rape and molestation crises in the Hasidic Jewish areas of New York to see this, or the endless discussions of the role of Islam in violent crimes.

2. For better or for worse, organized political Christianity has mobilized itself around being anti-gay, and in areas where they’re strong, it goes well beyond marriage equality issues into things like denying that gayness exists, e.g., Tennessee. It’s not an unfair thing to bring up.

Just to point out, I don’t imagine that the total number of lynchings was more important than the terror of living with the knowlege that a lynching could happen at any time and you or any surviving family members would have no recourse.

I can’t even imagine living under that type of oppression, can you?

The public nature of the act of lynching and the participation of crowds in a simulated execution certainly makes it a qualitatively different act. For all I know, that is what the statistics refer to; looking at case histories, I suspect those are a minority of that 3,600.

As for what I can imagine, well, I have lived in neighborhoods where the homicide rate was around 25 per 100,000. I managed.

” I don’t imagine that the total number of lynchings was more important than the terror of living with the knowlege that a lynching could happen at any time and you or any surviving family members would have no recourse.”

But not only were lynchings infrequent, they were not usually random events. The vast majority were extra judicial killings. That obviously is not right, but it isn’t like random black people were being attack on the streets, at least under ordinary circumstances.

“I can’t even imagine living under that type of oppression, can you?”

Well, since the numbers of whites kills by blacks since, say, 1965 far surpasses the numbers of blacks lynched in the 90 years before that, I’d say we are living under that sort of oppression. The whole ‘recourse’ thing probably doesn’t mean a lot to the parents of Lily Burk, Eve Carson, etc etc.

For better or for worse, organized political Christianity has mobilized itself around being anti-gay, and in areas where they’re strong, it goes well beyond marriage equality issues into things like denying that gayness exists, e.g., Tennessee. It’s not an unfair thing to bring up

Dux Belloram, it is not unfair to bring up the following:

1. Gay groups have asked that it be made a cause of action to refuse to hire or rent to them, interfering with people’s freedom of contract. The proliferation of rights threatens liberty.

2. Gay groups and termites in bureaucracies have insisted on including chatter about homosexuality in school curriculum and extracurricular propaganda in favor of the homosexual population

3. Gay groups and termites in the bureaucracy persuaded welfare departments to allocate children for adoption and foster care placements to homosexuals, as if mothers and fathers are redundant, and then persuaded judges to make asinine rulings that state and federal constitutions prohibited county and state governments from refusing to do so.

4. Gay groups with the aid of the ‘public interest’ bar have persuaded appellate judges to make asinine decisions to the effect that state and federal constitutions require formal recognition of homosexual affliations.

—

Your allies demanded legally extended privileges from public institutions and private parties and have insisted that they are such special people that the community does not have the discretion to tell them to buzz off. Yes, I imagine people might counter-organize. Liberals fancy its only fair their opponents think like battered wives.

“For better or for worse, organized political Christianity has mobilized itself around being anti-gay, and in areas where they’re strong, it goes well beyond marriage equality issues into things like denying that gayness exists, e.g., Tennessee. It’s not an unfair thing to bring up.” — Dux Etc.

No, that is correct; but it’s unsporting for a newspaper of record to bring it up, I suggest, without its choosing to carefully distinguish between Christianity and “organized political Christianity” seeking blame for the murder of the openly gay mayoral candidate in Mississippi.

Lord Christ on trial testified to a provincial procurator that His kingdom is not of this world, which makes the “organized political Christianity” community decidedly out of touch with the Master and His desires.

Is it “anti-gay” to call homosexuality a sin? I don’t think so. Christianity, addressing all of humanity, contends that “There is none that doeth good, no not one;” and “All our righteousness are as filthy rags.” Freud himself would not argue otherwise. His answer was a couch. Christianity’s is a Crucified, and it’s decidely equal-opportunity approach. We’re all reprobates, to some degree or other. The easy thing to do would be to blame mommy, either for her genes or for her gaffs and jabs, but then original sin only goes so far, even in an Age of Victimhood.

I agree that this exercise by the WaPo is appalling – and I say that not just because I’m a Christian, but because I’ve been a journalist!

Seriously, whatever happened to checking out rumors before printing them as facts — or reporting the news, rather than trying to make it?

That being said, I’m familiar with quite a few churches and small groups that cross the line between “love the sinner, hate the sin” and “OMG GAYS ARE RUINING THE WHOLE WORLD AND SENDING US ALL TO HELL!!!!”
And I do worry about the teenagers and other people there who might be gay but feel too afraid to tell anyone.

The real issue is whether or not homosexual behavior is sinful. If it is sinful, and as a conservative Christian I believe that the Bible is clear that it is sinful, then those who have homosexual desires and cannot in good conscience marry someone of the opposite sex should live in chastity.

(1) this happened in Mississippi, which SWPL WaPo interns know from their map consists of redneck bible thumping Christians, with a small number of soulful, wise blacks who mostly stare into the heavens with a spiritual look on their eyes like Christians in mid 1960’s swords and sandals epics.

(2) I’ve noticed the idea, which appears to be pretty common on the internet anyway, that the high rates of dysfunctional behavior which are very common in the gay community in particular – high levels of drug and alchohol abuse, depression, abusive relationships – are caused by people outside the gay community. So people who don’t approve of some aspect of gay culture or politics are responsible for self-destructive behavior of those within the gay community.

“Gay groups have asked that it be made a cause of action to refuse to hire or rent to them, interfering with people’s freedom of contract.” — Art Deco

It’s never been clear to me why conservative Christians are so passionate about preserving the rights of employers to fire an otherwise responsible employee for no other reason than that said employee is gay. This is the kind of stuff that makes Christians look like bigots. I can sort of understand why certain Christians oppose same-sex marriage. But come on! Denying gay people service at restaurants merely because they are gay? Denying gay people employment merely because they are gay? It strikes me that a lot of conservative Christians, especially evangelicals, are not just content to preserve traditional marriage; they want to punish gay people by denying them the opportunity to compete for jobs and the opportunity to be served at restaurants.

I haven’t really paid any attention to this story. But my first thought was, maybe it was a spurned ex-lover. Maybe that’s uncharitable of me, but in truth, people are most often killed by those closest to them. It’s why the police always question significant others and spouses of homicide victims. Of course, you have to take into consideration the possibility of a hate crime, but it’s not by any means the only possible motive.

I don’t quite see that a brief quote from a rabbi (a rather well balanced one) headlined by a question and followed by the usual comments from the chattering classes, amounts to the crime you suggest. Was this even published in the print edition? It certainly doesn’t appear to have been offered as news, nor as an editorial endorsement of anything.

The criticism is rather muddled too — although several nuggets of plausible fact are embedded in the muddle.

Are we worried that Christianity is being blamed when the real cause may have been either of two types of personal passion? Or are we worried that protected speech is being critiqued as the cause of homicide?

There is no question that individuals have committed murder, and wrapped themselves in the mantle of some religious precept or other, e.g. the killers of Matthew Shepherd. Generally, though, it seems to me that these are people with an inclination to kill, who seized upon an available excuse, rather than people who were representative of religious faith.

＂It’s never been clear to me why conservative Christians are so passionate about preserving the rights of employers to fire an otherwise responsible employee for no other reason than that said employee is gay.＂

You all wish to do this on behalf of a population segment that is not disproportionately poor, that need not make their extracurricular activity explicit to others, and who might just benefit from being told that some of their personal distress is not that important and their need to exhibit themselves not that admirable.

Why not be passionate about putting this legal profession-higher ed racket out of business and have people confront each other in the market as free agents?

rr, it wasn’t clear to me when reading your post that you were limiting. It seemed as if you were saying anyone who was gay needed to live in chastity, or at least that’s how I read it. My apologies for misinterpreting.

Probably the saddest prediction I could make concerning the unprecedented craze of proliferating homosexual “rights” in our lifetimes is that when this government finally reaches a point of catastrophic bankruptcy (which it almost certainly will), its powers to protect minorities will certainly diminish. And that will happen just at the same time that poverty and resentment increase in the populace.

We may therefore expect acts of retribution by many of the silenced, demeened citizens who legitimately rejected the moral degeneracy of the homosexual “lifestyle” and the “re-education” they are presently forced to endure against their own common sense.

I do not want for this, nor would I make excuses for it. But let’s not pretend it can’t happen. Let’s also not pretend that the people who treat homosexuality with this sort of animus are all God-fearing Christians. Many cultures (including such un-Christian places as Castro’s Cuba) have treated homosexuals more deplorably than Christian societies generally do.

How many folks here, I wonder, know that sodomy is still a crime in Mississippi. That there are hate-crime laws but that anti-gay crime is not included. MS officials don’t cooperate with federal hate-crime statistics programs. No anti-discrimination laws in MS for sexual orientation. A constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, on civil unions, and on recognition of both from other states.

Now, if you ask Rod or any other person why those things are the case, they would cite the strong influence of what? Heatstroke?

＂Now, if you ask Rod or any other person why those things are the case, they would cite the strong influence of what? Heatstroke?”

1. “Hate crimes” laws are humbug. Statistics on ‘hate crimes’ are unlike statistics on robberies. You need either an adjudicatory procedure or interpretive criteria to ascertain if the ‘hate crime’ actually happened, rendering the value of the statistics dubious.

2. Sodomy laws are conventional (though the penalties incorporated into Mississippi law are excessive). New York’s proscription of consensual sodomy may still be on the books even though no one has attempted to enforce it since 1980. The last prosecution in New York concerned two men arrested in a parked car. These laws are inherently unenforceable except in odd circumstances.

3. Refusal to grant legal recognition to homosexual couplings is simply good policy.

Well ordered societies maintain a conception of what sex is for and what it is not, where it belongs and where it does not. Nothing shameful about that.